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by Nick Knisely and friends

Christopher Evans: Common Prayer Anglicans

Christopher has written up his thoughts on a piece by Nathan Humphrey wherein Nathan suggests a different binary set of lenses to use when viewing the parties in the Anglican Communion: Federalists and Covenanters.

After pointing out that these two categories may in fact be different than those suggested before (liberal/conservative or reasserter/reappraiser), the whole enterprise of trying to put people in camps within Anglicanism automatically leads to throwing the Anglican baby out with the bath-water.

He calls us to a focus our Common Prayer and even suggests a new name:

“I remain committed to being a Common Prayer Anglican. If we lose our common-ness in prayer, we have lost our soul and the Christ we teach, proclaim, and pray. For it is this Common Christ in common prayer Who is the ground of our being a Body (what ecclesiology is supposedly about), not overlay of theories Romish and Genevan or even Eastern. (For those interested in an Anglican approach, see the works of Bp Stephen Sykes.) The latest crisis will pass and if we have yoked ourselves to some other arrangement, we may still be Christian, but we may cease to be Anglican Christians, that is Common Prayer Christians. Party spirit will hasten that day if we’re not careful. My opposition to the Covenant does not to make me a Federalist per se, but rather one who desires to retain our way: Common Prayer. Our current default federalism and diffuse authority (spread out over many bodies and actors) is akin to that arising from Benedictine monasticism, rather than a concerted effort or choice on our part. And I’d like to keep it that way”